The Plébiscite or, A Miller's Story of the War   By: Émile Erckmann

HISTORICAL ROMANCES OF FRANCE

THE PLÉBISCITE

OR

A MILLER'S STORY OF THE WAR

BY ONE OF THE 7,500,000 WHO VOTED "YES"

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF

ERCKMANN CHATRIAN

ILLUSTRATED

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

NEW YORK::::::::::::::::::::::1911

COPYRIGHT, 1889, 1898

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

ILLUSTRATIONS

" He robbed you, that's all " . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

" The grapeshot has mown them down. There are none left "

They drew two poor old men from their cellar

There he was, leaning forward to listen

" Good by, my father! Good by, my mother! "

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The present volume serves to emphasize the important connection, so generally now lost sight of, between the plébiscite of 1870 in France and the war with Prussia which so speedily followed. Under the administration of Ollivier, which promised an attractive extension of popular liberties, it will be remembered, the plebiscitum of the Roman Constitution was borrowed, to give an air of popular approval to the strongly attacked Imperial régime by taking the sense of the people through universal suffrage as to the continuance of the Imperial authority on its then existing basis. Of the web of chicane and corruption by which the election was brought out an overwhelming triumph for Imperialism, MM. Erckmann Chatrian give a clearer and more impressive notion in this book than could be obtained from entire volumes of parliamentary reports and whole files of newspapers. But they make it especially clear how the people were persuaded to return a majority of "yeses" so enormous as to make it impossible to account for it on the theory of mere corruption and chicane. It is evident from this narrative that the people were made to believe that the Empire meant peace abroad and freedom from foreign complications then threatening, as well as tranquillity at home, and that therefore one of the profoundest instincts of twenty millions of peasantry was utilized in order to be subsequently betrayed.

No authors could have been so happily chosen to write the story of the struggle which followed. Alsace and Lorraine, at once the scene of the earliest campaign of the war and the victims of its result, furnish the most appropriate background of such a picture. In reading these adventures, sufferings, meditations, and discussions of the simple yet shrewd Alsatian miller and his neighbors, the reader will take in almost at a glance the causes, incidents, and consequences of one of the greatest of modern wars. The corruption of the office holding classes, the ignorance of the army officers whose ranks had been filled by favoritism, the bravery of the private soldier ill equipped, ill fed, and disastrously led, the contrasting system and discipline of the Prussians, the awakening by Gambetta of the national enthusiasm, and the determined and dogged fighting under Chanzy, Faidherbe, and Bourbaki, how the peasants fared at the hands of the enemy, and how the enemy conducted themselves during the brief campaign are all unfolded before the reader with a combined fulness and incisiveness difficult to encounter elsewhere in narratives of this momentous conflict.

THE PLÉBISCITE

OR

A MILLER'S STORY OF THE WAR

CHAPTER I

I am writing this history for sensible people. It is my own story during the calamitous war we have just gone through. I write it to show those who shall come after us how many evil minded people there are in the world, and how little we ought to trust fair words; for we have been deceived in this village of ours after a most abominable fashion; we have been deceived by all sorts of people by the sous préfets, by the préfets, and by the Ministers; by the curés, by the official gazettes; in a word, by each and all.